Forums

Geoffrey MordlerGeoffrey Mordler might look like your average 26-year-old, but he's actually one of the lead software engineers behind WalkFree, a revolutionary new app that lets members of the tech industry monitor homeless activity during the harrowing walks to their chartered commuter buses. But even as one of the top earners in his industry, Mordler still relies on some penny-pinching secrets to make his dollar count in the expensive city of San Francisco.

Food and Eating

More than anything, humans spend too much time on food. Thinking about food. Shopping for food. Talking about where they want to eat food. Sitting down and waiting for people to serve them food. Wasting even more time talking to and even laughing with friends over food. It offends me.

That's why I've devised a way to maximize the efficiency of food consumption. At the beginning of every month, I have a 50-pound bag of rice and a 50-pound bag of pinto beans delivered to my door. Every morning I pour three cups of each into a divided rice cooker, turn it on, and continue with my day--regrettably, the man who delivers the rice and beans refuses to contribute to this step of my efficiency efforts, despite his low value within the job market. My diet may sound monotonous, but, over the past five years of living with this system, I've been able to develop three drastically different meals to eat throughout the course of a day:

Morning: Beans Over Rice

Lunch: Beans Under Rice

Dinner: Rice and Bean Medley

Tragically, I cannot control the desires of my lizard brain, and since the adding of spices would only delay consumption with the act of savoring, at times, I must give in to animal demands and eat something with flavor. In these shameful circumstances, I turn to one of the tech industry's many brands of flavor goo. After days and weeks of simple starches, a strawberry pouch of Soylent feels like a heroin addict's first hit!

Laundry and Hygiene

Frankly, the thought of doing any labor that doesn't involve coding makes me break out into hives. And I should mention the UI (user interface) of most washing machines and dryers disgusts me; clearly, this is an industry in need of a Laundry Solution from my talented and forward-thinking peers.

Since I refuse to reduce my life to such barbarism, my living space is free of any washing or drying units. I also would never set foot in a laundromat, where the dregs of humanity pump quarter after quarter into wasteful monstrosities, and then sit--they sit! They just sit and read their magazines as the world passes them by. But not me. I have an arrangement with the Russian dry cleaning place next store, where they sell me chemically damaged apparel for a song. Obviously, I don't manage to get my hands on a fresh item of clothing for every day of the year, but since I work from home, the uneconomical American standard for cleanliness is reduced to a much more manageable level. If an article of clothing passes the "gag test"--meaning it doesn't activate my gag reflex from more than two feet away--it simply goes back into the rotation. Sure beats buying a gallon of detergent every few months like one of Big Soap's lapdogs!

Entertainment

Another time-wasting distraction. Though I live to code and code to live, my mind can only spend so many hours staring at the many programming languages I've mastered. Some of my peers had the gall to recommended books, TV shows, and movies, as if I'd be stupid enough to buy into a bunch of lies that never happened. You know, when you see one of those Pirates of the Carribean things, you're not actually watching a bunch of pirates? Nope! It's just actors, paid to stand around and say words they memorized. Why anyone would ever participate in this kind of farce is beyond me, and I have an IQ of 155.

Companionship

Nothing frustrates me more than the continued insistence from peers and family members that I go out and meet people. In return, I ask them, "To what end?" You honestly want me to spend countless hours with another person and see absolutely no return on my invested time? And then what? After all those years, they end up just like we all do: dead. So I say, "Why bother?"

Unfortunately, the rare Skype meeting with my company means I cannot let my vocal cords atrophy, so I spend upwards of eight minutes a day--broken up into four two-minute shifts--speaking with a small cactus kept in my unused kitchen. These stream-of-consciousness ramblings allow me to clear my head of thoughts as I scan the room and speak my mind. "The sun sure is pretty on these blank walls, cactus." Or "You wouldn't believe the size of the bean I pulled out of my beans over rice at breakfast, cactus!" He doesn't reply, and I like it that way. Any other arrangement would have me contemplating the thoughts, feelings, and experience of another creation, which would rob my life of even more valuable hours.

Until The Singularity happens, though, I understand my very existence is trapped in a prison of meat. Which means I've often thought of employing a vessel to accept my DNA in order to create another human that will carry my coding legacy into the future. With my high salary and value to society, you think it'd be easier to find a woman willing to meet for close to three minutes a week to complete the fluid exchange process, but finding someone with the sensitivity to allow this to happen from behind the safety of a nonjudgmental plywood wall? That's another story altogether. If you happen to know any females like this, it would be a huge favor to me if you could have this person drop a line to questions@walkfree.com. HR will pick up the ball from there.

This space-age device is a cardboard box with two holes in it. The operative sticks a hand in one end. The contact inserts a hand in the other end. With both hands shielded from prying eyes, a secret handshake can commence.